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Archive for March, 2009

As if you have not been inundated enough with Earth Hour 2009 news, here is another attempt to encourage you to participate.

Saturday March 28th from 20:30-21:30 EDT is Earth Hour.
An attempt at bringing attention to various things, global climate change,
outrageous resource usage, waste, placating astronomers and more. From its
humble roots in 2007. I am amazed at the growth and reach of this initiative.
Its real affects are small, but getting the concepts of conservation, pollution
and waste into the attention span of the average citizen is a start.

Here at work we will be shutting down non-essential systems, computers, air
handling units for the weekend starting Friday afternoon.

At home we plan on running this event for most of the day, powering down
non-essential electrical devices, turning off non-essential computer systems,
keeping all of the lights off from morning until evening, and if clear, be
outside enjoying the night skies during the actual event itself.

We also plan on taking Sky Quality Meter readings before during and after.
The only downside are the idiot politicians who moved daylight savings to early
March, blindly assuming it is a good thing, when modern studies show that it is
not… I would go as far to say as detrimental to energy use and conservation.

So the skies will not be totally dark as they would have been otherwise in
Eastern Standard Time.

At 7:44 am 11:44 UT Spring officially came, and asked Old man winter to leave. The skies were clear and the moon hung in the SE like a Christmas tree ornament. Though the temperatures were cool all day at 4C, the wind was from the North, making it cool, and a reminder that winter doesn’t want to leave.

Many errands were ran, and the rest of the afternoon was ours. The new coldframe was put together and placed in the 3rd raised bed garden. The two coldframes on the south side of the greenhouse was planted with Artic King and Rouge Hivre lettuce seed. The greenhouse was filled with seedelings and the heat was put on to keep them warm. On Saturday, the rest of the peppers (though late) and tomatoes and flowers will be planted. Kevin plans on fixing the roof. It feels so good and exciting to have the seedlings come up and grow, the change of a season, the turning of the tide, the anticipation of gardening adventures.

Last Thursday March 12th, we attended a lecture byEd Lawrence, a master gardener with a regular call-in program on CBC Radio. Maybe 30-35 minutes of the time was spent on general background on the ontario cosmetic pesticide ban and the next 90 minutes or so on Q&A from the audience.

The International Space Station made a very high pass Monday night (2009 March 16) and we captured it on two images from the allsky camera.
The maximum altitude was 81 degrees and the estimated magnitude from heavens-above.com was -2.3.
The camera picked them up with no problem. Each exposure was 120 seconds long with about a 20-30 second gap while the firsti mage was downloading from the camera.

2009 Observing Last Night
Overall I found that the 5/4″ eyepieces on the 90mm Meade were a lot easier to hold the camera up to the eyepiece and snap off images (than the 2″ eyepieces). I was using a 25mm plossl (about x36 I think), 1/1000sec exposures and the camera on continuous motor drive as it were… Starting with wide angle and then zooming in to x4 on the camera optics and changing the exposure
up to 1/125 sec we had 100 images before you could shake a stick… good
thing too.. clouds came in and it was cold and Rick Mercer was about to
come on.

Then the cool thing happened… reviewing the images inside and
noticed a neat feature lit up on the moon… in the shape of an X

Cool! It looks like the Lunar X feature that was imaged without even
hunting for it! (see RASC Journal April 2007). Attached are two small
images.. one wide angle and the other heavily cropped…
Here they are: